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Firefox-GTK—Day 42© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I installed Firefox on my test box, but not without some initial confusion. Recall that my test box is not yet networked with my multi-boot primary box. I still patiently play sneaker net with my hard drive bays and a spare hard drive. As the two boxes are only two feet apart, I hesitate calling this operation sneaker net! I copied the Firefox installer to my spare drive. I also copied all of the extensions I had downloaded. Then, thinking I might get lucky and bypass a lot of configuration hassles, I copied my Windows profile. I suspected that because the file path syntax is different between the two environments that I would not be able to use all the files, but people do get lucky once in a while! I installed the spare hard drive and booted. I extracted the Firefox tar.gz installer files. So far so good. Then I tried running the installation script. I kept receiving a bash “command not found” or “bad interpreter: permission denied” errors. Hmm. I was already logged in as root. A permissions problem was unlikely. I tried running another bash script. No problems. I sat back and pondered for a few moments. Then—I wonder. . . I copied the files from the FAT32 partition to my ext3 /tmp directory. The installation proceeded according to Hoyle! Aha—don’t try running ’nix stuff from a FAT32 partition. Um, why not? I have no idea. Actually, this makes no sense at all. I continued installing Firefox. I need two dozen or so extensions to make Firefox operable fror the way I like to browse, but Firefox nonetheless works well. I hope Firefox works well in GNU/Linux too. After installing Firefox, I hoped I could copy most (most, not all) of my files from my Windows profile and continue from there. I tried that and Firefox would load but not run. I then reverted to my previous “empty” profile. I then added my user.js file. Something in that overall configuration prevented me from installing my preferred theme Qute. I reverted to my “empty” profile and then could install the theme using drag-and-drop from the file manager. One thing that frustrates me about the Firefox extension and theme managers is there is no way to install from a local file. I have news for the Firefox developers, everybody is not on broadband. I then copied several files: bookmarks.htm, userChrome.css, userContent.css, hostperm.1 and cookies.txt. I deleted the lines from user.js configuring the browser for a proxy. I use the Proxomitron proxy-filter in Windows. Everything finally loaded fine but I was unhappy. The main and personal toolbar heights were too high. I have some code in userChrome.css that work in Windows to reduce toolbar heights, but they have no effect in Slackware. Additionally, I dislike the way the GTK model reverses the Cancel button. Lastly, I suspect another GTK problem with the URL and search bars being raised and embossed. I want conventional text boxes, thank you. My test box operates at 1024 x 768. I have yet to migrate Firefox to my primary box, which operates at a higher 1280 x 1024 screen resolution. Perhaps that higher resolution will resolve some of these aesthetic problems. The reversed Cancel button is something I am not going to like—ever. So much so that I might stop using Firefox. Interestingly, Mozilla does not reverse the order. After establishing my initial installation baseline, I tried again copying parts of my profile. Again Firefox loaded but the toolbars and menus were distorted and nothing worked except the Close button. I tried again but copied fewer files. Same result. Thus, I resigned myself to installing more than two dozen plus extensions. I also resigned myself that I might have to manually configure every one of those extensions too. Drag-and-drop from my file manager onto the extension manager only seldom works. Often, my efforts were stopped because the extension manager never responded at all. Sometimes I would receive a Kwin error message that the extension manager had stopped responding. Even more strangely, when I terminated the extension manager, Firefox closed too. Sometimes, just dragging and dropping a file on the extension manager closed both. Eventually I resigned myself to installing each extension manually through the File-Open dialog box. Installing the extensions this way is frustrating because the dialog box always reverts to the html file extension. The dialog box seems incapable of remembering that I previously selected All files (*). Thus, every time I have to reselect this option. Of course, multiple selections do not work either. After finally installing the extensions I loaded Firefox. Every click of the mouse button took about 3 to 4 seconds to respond. Something is wrong. Firefox is provided as-is—a minimally configured browser. Ask 100 people what extensions they think they need to massage Firefox into the browser they want and you’ll receive 100 unique answers. Likewise for me. Nonetheless, this reinstallation process highlights a problem for the Firefox developers that has been raised often in the Firefox discussion forum. IT administrators would like to install Firefox company-wide, but there is no easy way to roll-out Firefox on a massive scale. The easy statement is that Firefox is not ready for prime-time. I only want to duplicate one profile from one box to another. Too much work is required. The idea that I have to install everything and reconfigure everything was almost enough to make me stop installing Firefox. My challenge now is I am in a quandary about a browser. Firefox works fine in Windows. Konqueror is not as easy to customize as Firefox. Unless I can fix my Firefox problems, I might have to use Mozilla. That means checking all of my extensions to see which ones I can still use. I am discouraged. I’m irritated. Little things like this cause me to reflect whether migrating is worth my tme. At least my NT4 system just works. The next day I had an idea. Just maybe— Lately I have wondered if my test box might be hosed. Nothing specifically that I can trace, just little things. So I copied the Firefox directory and my configuration files to my primary box. Aha! No mouse problems! Everything seemed to be working. I then edited user.js to adjust my fonts and screen resolution. Things seemed to be working much more as expected. Relief! I also discovered why my URL and search bar were raised and embossed. I had opened the GTK-QT Theme Manager because initially my Firefox menu and toolbar fonts were too small. I toggled the settings but did not change anything. I figured that toggling would be all I needed to “awaken” the GTK-QT conversion. When I opened Firefox my fonts were fine. However, I noticed my URL and search bar were changed too. Okay, now I had some clues. I discovered that the GTK-QT Theme Manager is a configuration front-end for two configuration files: (1) .gtkrc-2.0 and (2) .gtk_qt_engine_rc. I had used the former file for a long time in my Mandrake 9.2 setting, so now I had a good idea what to fix. Currently I was more concerned with the font size and not having any other adjustments. I then commented out all lines except the line gtk-font-name=. Problem solved. Next I added Firefox to my KDE menu and added a Quick Launch icon to my Kicker Panel. There are a few more adjustments I want to make and then I’ll copy that configuration to my mortal user account. However, toolbar heights were still too big. In Windows they are just high enough to accommodate the buttons and no bigger. Sigh! I suppose I’ll have to consume time surfing again. I really like how my system is growing and evolving, but I grow weary that with every other configuration task I have to spend a long time looking for needles in the knowledge-base haystack for what I believe should be easy things to do. After some surfing I found some userChrome.css code to help me with my toolbar height as well as reversing the Cancel button in GTK. I realize the order of the Cancel button is a part of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), but I don’t care. After more than a dozen years of using the Cancel button in a specifc location I am not about to change. A day later I figured out what was wrong with my test box and mouse response. I was having problems getting Firefox to run as mortal user on my primary box. I was unable to save any preferences changes. I suspected a permissions problem although I could find nothing astray. Regardless, I went back to my test box to run Firefox from the command line in the hopes of noticing any peculiar messages. I noticed some messages about ALSA. That message was like a light bulb. During my trial run installing extensions, I had installed the SoundExtension extension. I have no sound card in my test box. I disabled that extension and I once again had a snappy Firefox. I then logged in as mortal user and manually created a ~/.mozilla directory. Then I ran the Mozilla browser. No problems. Then (back to root) I created symbolic link from /opt/firefox/firefox to /usr/local/bin/firefox. Then (back to mortal user—I love this multi-user environment!) I ran Firefox from the command line. I saw some messages about not being able to do something with the extension manager but the message also said “skipping.” Seemed okay. I then made some preference changes and had no problems. So something is hosed on my primary box. Finis. |
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